The Lorenz Attractor

"Lorenz Attractor" by J. Smith

Similar to the last one, the book for Book Club is about physics again....they are killing me! It's great stuff, but pretty far removed from almost anything I can relate to. So once again I am trudging through the book, in this case Chaos by James Gleick, at a snails pace.
Anyway in my reading I came across something called the Lorenz Attractor which is basically a graph, or model created by one Edward Lorenz, that depicts how non-linear things can behave in an organized kind of way that can be...predicable, but at the same time can display abrupt and unexpected changes at any time. It's similar to the "butterfly effect", where one small change can create (unpredictable) consequences farther down the road, but then somehow the system rights itself eventually and it starts again. It's a picture that describes chaos.
One prime example of something that follows this pattern is the weather.
For example you could say that for any August 15th (in the Northern Hemisphere) it will probably be warm to hot. And for the most part that "normally" true. But that doesn't mean that next August 15th it couldn't snow or hail. We've all experienced that sort of unpredictability. A hot day in the middle of December, or an ice storm in May.
There are lots of things that can be modeled using the Lorenz Attractor besides weather. Populations of species, the stock market, anything that seems pretty stable most of the time, then does something really crazy and unexpected. I think in my field of geology the periodicity of ice ages, and volcanoes would fall under a similar model.
Anyway, I was so inspired  and impressed by the notion that chaos could have a shape, that I decided to paint my own version of the Lorenz Attractor. The image was stuck in my head for days, so it was easy to paint. Trying to mimic the unpredictable side of chaos I didn't approach it with any sort of strategy though, I just started anywhere and kept layering on the paint until the image in front of me looked "right". And then I stopped.

The above is a 3D model I found on the internet. For a more in depth (and probably accurate) description of the Lorenz Attractor, click here, or you can Google it.

E=mc...Hammer?

I'm going to take a quick break  from my France posts (while it's still fresh in my mind) to write a blog about a couple of highlights that I got out of the book we read for my reading group this month. The book was called The God Particle- If the universe is the answer, what is the question? by Leon Lederman.
I have to say that it was a bit of a tough read for me. Not because it was poorly written, but because my mind does not function like that of a mathematician or physicist. (I hear E=mc ___? and I think Hammer, the 1990's, and balloon pants, not the speed of light squared.) That being said I actually got more out of it than any physics textbook I have ever read. But it was still slow going. And I should also note (for honesty sake:) that as of this moment, I've only read half of it. I intend to finish it, but like I said, it might take a while.
Anyway, the book is basically a history of particle physics beginning with the ancient Greeks all the way up to the super colliders of today. There is too much information to do a summary, but there were a couple points I wanted to...well, point out because I thought they were interesting.

1.)The first has to do with one Michael Faraday. He was a self taught physicist, who came from "nothing" and went on to make huge contributions to physics (here is the good part) and he was completely math illiterate! That's right, instead of long complicated equations, he just did experiments (mostly involving magnets and electrical fields), and then described in words what was going on. That's my kind of guy! Schrodinger and Maxwell, and later guys did the math that went along with Faraday's ideas. I just thought that was pretty cool since I too am fairly uninclined toward math. Faraday's biography is a pretty neat one (although a bit over religious for my blood), and a quick look up on Wikipedia will give you a nice summary if you are interested in learning more.

2.)Most of physics, when you move into the 19th century and beyond is crazier sounding than the wackiest science fiction you have ever read. It's beyond mind blowing, because much of it somehow exists in a way or form that our brains don't have the ability to comprehend it. For example, physics tells us that everything has what is called a wave/particle duality, which means that in some ways it acts like a particle of matter, and in some ways it acts like a wave (like ripples on the water or radio wave). Even we are since we are made out of particles of matter! I believe the reason we say it is a combination of these two things, is because it is impossible for us to imagine it as a single state of being that has both the properties of a matter and energy at the same time. It's too "far out" to comprehend. Here are a few other things that are apparently real, but I can't twist my brain around: there are "mathematical points" that actually exist as a real thing in the real world, there are particles that manage to have mass, but no size, or radius. Einstein says that mass is really just the curvature of space/time, so on a certain level everything including our bodies and brains and eyeballs are just a warped area of space and time. Then you have to wonder what is time exactly? And since time started after the Big Bang, then how can you have a time before time? Kooky stuff isn't it? That's why it was so hard to read. I'd go over the text several times thinking I misunderstood, but then I realized no, I'd gotten it right, it was really saying what I thought it was saying. It just made no sense to my macroscopic thinking brain.

3.)Another other thing that really stood out to me (FINALLY!) is why math is so essential to physics. Not the individual long crazy equations themselves, but what those equations, which are basically tools, allow scientists to do, how equations allow scientists to "see" things that they cannot detect by experamentation alone. It's something I'd never thought about before, and it's....totally amazing!
I'll give one example (because it's the  only one I fully understood...ha ha). It has to do with electrons , and I'm really going to make it simple (not for you, but for me:). Here it goes.This physicist named  Paul Dirac noticed that the equation he did to figure out the "electron-wave solution" (whatever that is) had two answers, in the same way that 2 x 2 = 4 but -2 x -2 = 4 does as well. The one solution matched the data he had for the electron. But the the other was a mystery. Basically the math was saying that for every particle there had to be another identical particle but with the opposite charge. The thing to note is, at the time when this equation was proved, physicists didn't have ANY physical evidence of an "antiparticle", or a reason to think one existed. Dirac wasn't quite sure what to do with the second solution. But jump ahead a little in time and lo-and-behold! the positron was discovered, which basically is an electron with a + charge!
The point I'm trying to get at is the math itself is what uncovered the possibility of a positron. It had nothing to do with the scientists, or any direct observation. The math knew it was there before people did! When you do the math, and you plug in values for this or that, the resulting equations tells you if you are right or wrong, on the right track, close but missing something, ignoring an important factor, or whatever. That's how physicists know that there are particles that haven't been discovered yet, and why they are forever hunting for things like Higgs bosons, and dark matter.! It's because when they add up everything we can observe in the universe, the mathematics don't balance out. The math tells them something is missing! Isn't that....pretty freaking cool? And math doesn't lie and it's dependable (well, my math does, but that's because I never do it right (sad face)). More dependable than our senses (as demonstrated by the positron)! But moving on.

4.)I want to take a minute or two to talk about a couple of the implications of Einstein's famous E=mc2 (it should be a "squared" 2, but I don't know how to do a post script in this program) and the Big Bang. E=mc2 (Energy=mass x speed of light squared) says that energy can create matter, and the more energy you have (and the closer to the speed of light you get) the more matter you can create. Have you ever wondered how all the stuff in the universe (including you and I) was suddenly created during the Big Bang out of "nothing"? Well, there was SO much energy in the explosion  that a LOT of matter was made almost instantaneously. That's how the super colliders work. They channel a bunch of eVolts into one particle and see what flies out when the energy, converted into new matter, is almost simultaneously smashed apart. Cool stuff hu? And they've found all kinds of interesting things. Quarks, and leptons, and weak and strong forces, and several other things, none of which I can explain or describe.

Well, I think that about exhausts my understanding of physics and The God Particle. Sorry this blog is a little disjointed. My brain kind of jumps and starts when I delve into math and physics, and so it appears in my writing. If you are interested in reading the book, I absolutely recommend it. The advice I would give is just try to get through it. Don't stop at every single detail that eludes you. If you just read it and understand what you can along the way, the story and the important concepts take shape despite the difficulties and you can still get a lot out of it.

Nerds Searching for WIMPs

The Hadron Collider in Switzerland

It is absolutely pouring out right now! And if you trust weather prediction, it's supposed to continue for the next week or so. I am at home warm and dry though. I got all my "chores" done early today, so I am shamelessly sporting my most comfortable (and therefore hideous and mismatched) clothes, drinking my 4th (or 5th?) cup of coffee, and planning on relaxing for the rest of the day, and enjoying the rainy weather.

Anyway, I read an article in the January issue of Popular Science that I thought was interesting about what physicists call "dark matter". I think that even if we don't know what term means, most of us have at least heard it before, either on shows like Star Trek, or some or another documentary about space. But if you are anything like me beyond the actual words themselves we are lost. Anyway, the article I read was great in that it didn't overly complicate what is (with certainty) a very complicated subject. (BTW it is the source for most of what I am going to write about.) In essence it dumbed down one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics to a level that my pitiful brain could process. And since I found it so interesting I wanted to pass it along to you. My plan is to give you a quick and dirty rundown on what dark matter is...or isn't actually.

You would think, because so many people (mostly physicists) theorize about dark matter, write articles about it, build machines to detect it, and spend millions (or probably billions) of dollars researching it, that dark matter would actually exist. But it turns out that would be in incorrect assumption. Surprisingly, as of right now, dark matter does NOT technically exist. Isn't that about the weirdest thing you've ever heard?  Not one particle of dark matter has ever been seen or directly measured by man! Not a one!
This begs the obvious question; "Then why do we think they exist in the first place?" At first glance you might be inclined to lump dark matter in the same category as God and Allah. But unlike the later, scientists have a very good reason to believe dark matter exists. And I'll try my best to explain it to you.

OK, so Newton (Sir Issac, not Wayne) came up with his second law of planetary motion 1687 that basically says the bigger (read "more mass") something is the faster it spins. For example the length of our day is 24 hours, while the length of a day on Jupiter is about 10 hours. Jupiter spins faster because it has more mass. There is a relationship between the mass of Jupiter and it's rate of rotation that can be worked out mathematically. That is to say that you can use math to predict (with excellent accuracy) how fast some heavenly body will rotate if you know what it's mass is. Or the other way around.

Well, back in the 1930's while observing a group of galaxies, one Fritz Zwicky realized that the rate of rotation (which can be measured by an objects Doppler Shift) of the galaxies he was looking at didn't add up to the number of stars that he was able to observe. Basically they were turning much faster than they should be. Based on Newtons second law those galaxies were missing a great deal of mass. The conclusion was that there MUST be more mass in those galaxies than science was capable of observing. It had to be there, we just couldn't see it directly. And thus "dark matter" was born.
In a way it's like observing the circular ripples on the surface of a smooth pond, but never having observed the stone that was tossed in that created them. You see the ripples and you know something had to make them. The spin of galaxies, and the way light is bent around certain regions of seemingly empty space are the ripples, and physicists are now looking for the stone, the actual particle of dark matter itself. And that is a daunting task. How do you look for something when you don't know what you are looking for? To continue with the analogy what if it's not a stone? It could be potato, or it could be another drop of water...who knows?

So how do you look for dark matter? Well, here's where it gets tricky. Scientist think that dark matter is really made up of what they call "weakly interacting massive particles" or WIMPs. This means that they barely interact with what we could call "normal" particles, but that they still have a mass (otherwise they couldn't affect the spin of the galaxies remember more mass=faster spin). I think the acronym is a bit ironic because, as Neil deGrasse Tyson says "85% of the gravity comes from something [and] we don't know what it is!" Eight five percent of everything in the universe doesn't seem very wimpy to me. Anyway physicists are taking two approaches to discover these WIMPs. One was is to create a detector that would capture the result of a head on collision of a WIMP and a regular particle. These devices are housed in old mine shafts and under mountains to discourage false readings by normal particles that bombard the earth every millisecond of every day. The other (as is being attempted at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland) is to try to make WIPMs ourselves by smashing protons together hard and fast enough. These facilities are also (I believe) underground. Bizarre isn't it?

It may sound like science-fiction to toss around terms like dark matter and WIMPs. It may seem crazy to look for something that as far as we know doesn't exist. But the "ripples" that physicists observe out in space must have been created by something. And I'll bet we discover dark matter before God appears and tells us it was him.

P.S. The title was borrowed from the article. The author read it off a a t-shirt:)

Philosophical Physics

There are lots of disciplines that fall under the heading of science. But what is science? How is it defined? And are all the current "scientific fields" really qualified to be called such?
I was reading an article about...well, to be completely honest, I am not really sure. The general topic was physics. It was a little over my head. Something to do with string theory and the gap between relativity and quantum physics...and lastly theoretical physics.
I think it's ironic that the the only one of the above mentioned that made any sense to me was the least "scientific" in my opinion. That was my first inkling that it might be misplaced.

Theoretical physics. It's cool, it's mind bending, it uses neat phrases like "space-time" and "alternate universes and parallel dimensions." It reminds me of Star Trek, and in general I love it. But at the same time I have noted that a lot of the ideas it puts forth to explain/understand the universe, seem extremely abstract, and from my limited understanding are non-testable. And if the theories are not subject to the scrutinies of the scientific method, then are they really theories at all? Should they exist under the umbrella of science?
To be clear, I am not talking about all branches of physics. I am only talking about the ultra abstract theoretical part. If, for example, you argue that there may be million of parallel universes, but we will only ever exist in our own, what is the value of speculating about it? What is scientific about it? Some scientists believe that for every universe that forms, an original brand of physics is created to accompany it. Ok, that sounds cool, but unless we expect to find ourselves somehow surviving the end of our present universe, and subsequently making it into the next, I don't see how that has anything to do with science. It's just as absurd to speculate about whether or not we will make it into heaven.
I don't think it is valueless, I just don't think it falls under the realm of true testable science. It seems too philosophical to me. I think it should be renamed philosophical physics. But maybe I'm wrong...Or maybe I am wrong in this universe, but right in another one! It's hard to say.